“... with which, when conducting, he could hear each member of the orchestra anticipated the prodigious Pierre Boulez, a composer-conductor who has similarly failed (so far) to find a suitable opera libretto, and of whom it could probably be said, as the composer-conductor Julius Benedict said of Mendelssohn, that he communicates his conception of a work ‘as ...”

“... into the night. Guattari was manic. ‘He needed something like Ritalin,’ his colleague Jean-Pierre Muyard recalled. ‘We had to find a way to calm him down.’ It was Muyard, who had studied philosophy with Deleuze at the University of Lyon, who arranged the first meeting between the two men. Guattari had drawn on Deleuze’s critique of structuralism ...”

“... too, provided it wasn’t Jewish. They ‘tried to seduce rather than impose their will’, as Pierre Boulez recalled, and on the whole they succeeded. They presided over a boom in sales of contemporary art and went out of their way to protect leading artists: Georges Braque showed 35 works in the Salon d’Automne in 1943, and was offered free coal ...”

“... the International Summer School of Modern Music at Darmstadt and the music he heard there – by Pierre Boulez, Edgard Varèse and the English twelve-tone composer Humphrey Searle, among others – made him feel sick. And while he recognised Coltrane’s improvisational genius, to Shankar’s ears the turbulence of the music opened a voyeuristic window ...”

“... the organic life of the music, the veins and the tissues of the music.’ On the other hand, for Pierre Boulez it is precisely the organic nature of Wagner’s development of the motifs in the Ring which is a source of admiration and respect. On this, I’m with Boulez. Rather than treating the leitmotifs as a handy ...”

“... rare. There is no one like that today, unless one considers extraordinary conductors – Pierre Boulez, for example, who is also a great composer – to be virtuoso performers akin to pianists and organists. Today’s concerts are extreme events, something quite apart from everyday life. Pollini or Barenboim or Yo-Yo Ma are individuals with ...”

“... an 18-year-old student of Cage’s, and by Morton Feldman, Cage’s friend; and thundered through Pierre Boulez’s fiendishly difficult first sonata. The penultimate piece on the programme was Cage’s latest, 4’33”. Tudor shut the piano and sat still. The wind rustled in the maples. Half a minute later he reopened the lid, then shut it. The summer ...”

“... of the concert hall. ‘Surrealist music’ is thin on the ground, though it could be argued that Pierre Schaeffer’s pioneering work with musique concrète in the late 1940s shifted the paradigm of composition towards a more hands-on, automatist methodology that chimed with surrealist practice. Vergo is good on paintings that turn on musical principles or ...”

“... of the intellectual world beyond cinema, publishing interviews with Barthes, Lévi-Strauss and Boulez. More radical changes followed in the wake of May 1968. In October 1969, Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni issued a manifesto for Cahiers’ new role, outlining a division of films into seven types, all differently inflected by ideology (from lucid ...”